The Tuesday Portrait: Dimitar Berbatov

What do you look like, Dimitar Berbatov?

A pumpkin, a ploughshare, a sullen boy, a sheaf of corn, a furrow, a scarecrow, a farm.

What do you mean, “a farm”?

I am moving on the pitch while a horse, broken from labor, gingerly walks around a split rail fence whose uppermost rail is sodden. It blows steam from its nostrils and shakes its stringy mane. It is the most matter-of-fact thing in the world, and yet its eyes are always hurt.

Why do its eyes look hurt?

Its eyes look hurt because it is misunderstood. Nothing could be more of its world than it is, and yet it, too, is a creature of obliquity whose twists and turns are hidden by its suitability to its function.

How do you play the game of football?

There is a way of huddling within oneself like a starved man waiting to leap on a man who may have food: then leaping on him the moment the fire goes out.

But I know you have a beautiful first touch.

There is a way of touching the ball that makes a fire go out.

But don’t you love to score goals?

I love to score goals. I score them with perfect transparency, like a hawk that plummets in the sky. Its intentions are apparent, but the bird upon which it is falling has no chance.

Your statements are curious, because you portray yourself as a rustic or wild creature, yet from a distance you appear to be a man who is hunched in a leather jacket inhaling deeply from a pinched cigarette as he crosses a bombed-out city square in the most cold concrete scenario in the world.

I am that man. But only in the way that the wind that blows through a ruined church is the wind that blows through the yellow plains beneath the indigo sky. There is a way of being balanced so that at any given moment one is practically sliding. One is able to tilt so far without forfeiting one’s place. On the football pitch I am an angle and a mystery. I am suddenness and an unexplained delay. I have hollow eyes, and yet my eyes are full of everything they must see.

The Tuesday Portrait: Dimitar Berbatov

I have rarely read such beautiful and cinematic writing. This reads like a Russian fairytale, and Berbatov has often reminded me of one of those illustrations in my fairytale books from the erstwhile USSR, the strangely beautiful eyes and the slim nose, the very high forehead, that quality of utter stillness and focussed intensity in impossible quests. Watching him play is a similar experience, that circling of the ball, like an eagle marking his prey, and your metaphor is wonderfully apt.

“My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Mou, that’s a lovely comparison. I hadn’t thought of Russian fairytales when I was writing the portrait, but now I see that they’re very similar to the aesthetic I had in mind. I’ve found some drawings by Ivan Bilibin which I can easily imagine Berbatov wandering through: